


Automatic - Mechanical - Pneumatic

by IfItHollers



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: "Glory Days" by Bruce Springsteen, "Rock and Roll Never Forgets" by Bob Seger, Alternate Universe - Daemons, American Pie, Canon-Typical Homophobia, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Gay Richie Tozier, Getting Together, Gibby - Freeform, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Innuendo, M/M, Night at the Museum - Freeform, Non Consensual Daemon Touching, Richie Tozier Has ADHD, Richie Tozier has sat on Robin Williams, Richie Tozier has slapped Ben Stiller across the face, Richie Tozier is a Mess, Richie Tozier's Birthday, Self-Loathing, The Ritual of Chüd, a piggie eating scrambled eggs, accidentally calling a female employee "honey", audra phillips has the same career as alyson hannigan, liminal spaces, mix of book and film canon, no animals were harmed in the making of this fanfic, richie eats clam chowder for breakfast, richie tozier has the same career as crystal the monkey, richie tozier needs a therapist, richie tozier's all-dead rock show, strange metaphor for gay profiling, strange metaphor for self-harm that involves being bitten by a monkey, street fighter - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:22:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23063161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IfItHollers/pseuds/IfItHollers
Summary: Richie Tozier and his dæmon are movie stars at the top of their career, named by the LA Times asthe most powerful dæmon in Hollywood. Then Richie gets a call from an old friend named Mike Hanlon.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 33
Kudos: 291





	Automatic - Mechanical - Pneumatic

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! It's my slightly belated fic for Richie Tozier's birthday!
> 
> If you're not into dæmon-verse, that's cool and you don't have to read. If you want to read and need a breakdown on how it functions--every human has a soul outside of their body represented by some kind of animal. It's generally accepted that the kind of animal represents something about your personality. Injuries to the dæmon can result in the death of the human. There's a strong taboo against touching someone else's dæmon either casually or accidentally, analagous to sexual assault, because touching someone's dæmon--their literal soul--is an extremely intimate act that can be done consensually. Dæmons can touch other dæmons, and a human can touch their own dæmon, but touching someone else's dæmon mandates complete trust. The human and dæmon are technically one being in two bodies, and disagreements between the two are very similar to the way people are sometimes "of two minds" about something. It is generally accepted fanon that someone with a dæmon the same sex as themselves is gay, though this is not always the case--you just see a lot of dæmon fic with M/M pairings where one has a male dæmon and the other has a female.
> 
> Trigger warnings for this fic: Technically, Richie self-harms. This manifests in his dæmon biting him, which is considered aberrant and disorderly behavior, since the dæmon is the self. This is not explored to full depth in this fic and is meant to represent the internal conflict and self-loathing Richie experiences made external, because it's technically shared through two bodies. His dæmon is also frequently verbally aggressive and reprimands him, because Richie's self-esteem is not good and this is how it manifests--he genuinely believes he needs her to keep him in line. This is representative of bad mental health.
> 
> Other content warnings: canon-typical homophobia and internalized homophobia, canon-typical violence, especially racially motivated violence towards Mike, though this occurs offscreen. Stanley Uris's suicide. Eddie's impalement happens onscreen in this fic. Be careful.
> 
> With all that said, the only other thing you need to know is that Richie's dæmon is a capuchin monkey.

Meg wears her diamonds to the Jade of the Orient.

Putting a collar on your dæmon is kind of classless, but Meg’s a movie star and movie stars need their own jewelry. Basically as soon as Richie gets off the phone with Mike Hanlon—as soon as he’s done puking—he goes into his bedroom and starts packing, throwing handfuls of Calvin Klein underwear into his bag, opening the next drawer, grabbing shirts arbitrarily. He’s dressed down for just fucking around at home in the wake of the press shit for _Gibby_ , but for some reason it doesn’t occur to him to change clothes. The idea of taking off anything between him and the outside world is anathema right now.

“Richie,” says Meg. She’s sitting on top of the dresser, in front of the showbusiness vanity with its metal studs in place of actual lights.

Richie’s on the phone with Carol Feeny, his travel agent, at the moment. “Next flight out of here to Bangor, Maine. I’ll pay whatever it costs, I don’t care.”

“Do you mind if there’s a layover?” Carol asks in his ear.

“Richie,” says Meg.

Phone held between his shoulder and his jaw, he says, “Nah, I don’t mind. Whatever’s fastest.”

“All right,” Carol says, and there’s the sound of tapping. “Mmm, you mind an overnight? How’s Boston?”

Logan Airport is a fucking nightmare—all their little travel kiosks are always closed whenever Richie’s trying to fly out of there, which means he staggers around looking for a Dunkin Donuts, trying to get his blood sugar back up. Also he’s a fucking asshole, so he ends up ordering “one lahge iced cahfee,” and the zombie-looking cashier doesn’t even question it, he gets no attention at all for his completely involuntary and reflexive voice, and then he’s stuck drinking a fucking iced coffee for no goddamn reason.

“Sounds good,” he says. “What time?”

“Your flight’s at nine. You want me to send you a car?”

“Oh, Carol, it’s like you can read my mind. I owe you one. No, two.”

Me says again, “Richie.”

Carol laughs. “You don’t owe me anything. But if you wanted to do me a favor, you could put Kinky Briefcase on the phone.”

“Oh, I’ll do anything you want, I’ll see if he’s here,” Richie says, and called up the Voice: “Kinky Briefcase, Sexual Accountant here. I got a guy who comes into my office the other day, says, _I need to know if I can afford to sue this girl I hooked up with. Turns out she’s an MMA fighter, she didn’t like what I was saying, she popped me in the jewels, man!_ I said, _Buddy, I know you’re worried about your jewels, but you don’t need my help for that. You need to call a doctor if you’re stiff for more than four hours._ ”

Carol shrieks with laughter. Richie’s particularly fond of her because she started listening to his bullshit podcast when he told her he did voicework outside of Meg— _Nanna_ , he called her, Meg is Nanna to everyone who isn’t Richie these days—Nanna’s career. He was fishing a little, feeling lousy in general that day because his flight had been cancelled three full times, and not only did Carol get him out of that, the next time he asked her to schedule him a trip she put a postscript in her email (how charming, an actual postscript) to tell him she loved _Nanna Records_.

“God, I love that,” Carol sighs. “My boyfriend doesn’t believe it’s really you, says you have to get different people in there and you script them—”

“Aw, honey, do you believe I could script this bullshit?” Richie asks, lapsing into some of the Southern drawl and then wincing, because she’s a female employee and he’s not _that_ much of a dick. “Ah, sorry, force of habit.”

“I’ll let that one slide,” Carol says, her voice tolerantly amused. “For Kinky Briefcase.”

“Let me know if you and your boyfriend want tickets to anything,” Richie says. “I don’t want him to beat me up, Nanna’s not gonna want to take me to any carpets if I get my mug all busted up.”

Meg rolls her eyes. Carol laughs again and assures him that there’s no possibility of that. He confirms email receipt of his flight, his rental car, and his hotel reservation, and once he’s gently hung up with Carol, Meg flies at him, latches onto his arm, and bites hard down into his hand. He feels the skin break.

Richie gasps. “Bitch,” he manages.

“Focus,” Meg says. “You’re packing like an idiot. Get your watch.”

So Richie takes out the stupid, overly fancy Fortuna watch. He doesn’t know shit about watches, he just felt like he ought to buy one back in 2012, when they were doing _Animal Practice_ and Crystal was just raking it in. He wouldn’t have really known what to do with it except that this one has not just a tiny speedometer in its big black face, it also has a tiny compass, and for some reason that idea seemed so charming that Richie picked that one out of all the other watches he knew nothing about.

And then he picks up the flat jewelry tins—mostly the same size and material as an Altoids container—that belong to Nanna and tuck them into his duffle. They made it out of Derry, Maine, and here’s the proof. Richie Tozier has a fancy German watch, and his dæmon gets paid twice what most Hollywood actors do in a year. She’s gonna wear _diamonds_.

* * *

Carol did a good job picking out the rental car. Richie has the usual attack of imposter syndrome as soon as the Avis clerk pulls it up out front of the airport and hands him the keys, which makes him feel right at home.

It’s only thirty miles from the Bangor International Airport to the Derry Townhouse. Richie dozed a little on the overnight flight, earbuds singing Marvin Gaye and Springsteen and Paul Simon directly into his head even though it’s been years since he’s dropped off to sleep right at nine. Planes do that to him, sometimes. He doesn’t want to talk to people, he wants to go to airplane mode as sure as his phone does, and it means that he gets to skip the experience of being in the uncanny not-place that is an airplane— _are you in California or Massachusetts, Rich? Are you in Massachusetts or Maine? Past or present? Dead or alive?_

Also whenever Richie wakes up after a plane nap he wanders around with his eyes wide enough he looks like he’s seen a ghost, which means that if any enterprising fans got candids of him in the Legal Seafood before six in the morning, eating clam chowder for breakfast because why the fuck not, he’s going to be back on TMZ with speculation about his mental health again. Dæmon mouths don’t produce their own bacteria and Meg doesn’t really handle things with her mouth, so there was no reason to sterilize the bite on his hand, but he put a bandage over it just to keep things simple. He’s got plenty of thick white scars on his hands and he doesn’t need a fresh red one to keep people guessing.

He checks into his room in the Townhouse—it’s one guest room per floor, and truly ancient memories are waking up in his brain. Who’s gonna be there? Not Mike, Mike lives at home—Mike was always homeschooled, Mike doesn’t know about the pass the bullies gave Bill for the school year of 1988 because his brother got fucking murdered, because it’s open season on Mike Hanlon all the time. Mike Hanlon laying on the ground with his big dog dæmon shivering and cowering not because it’s being threatened by Bowers’s dæmon, but because Bowers’s viper has its mouth open wide around Mike’s leg, ready to bite.

Bill.

Richie hasn’t thought about Bill Denbrough in years. Big Bill Denbrough.

He takes his shoes off and throws himself down into the bed without bothering to strip out of his jeans, and Meg—uncharacteristically clingy for her—climbs into the bed with him and cuddles up to him. They haven’t done that since they were kids—maybe since he was breaking down in college, absolutely dealing with mood cycling or something, but even during a bad trip or a real bender Meg was never comforting about it. She popped him across the face more than once, trying to get him to get it together. Not now. Now she climbs under the covers with him and, where his back’s turned to the door, clambers over him and tucks up against his chest.

Like a baby. He can’t remember right now how he realized that Meg had settled—it was here, in Derry, wasn’t it?—but Meg was always taking primate forms. Dad had an orangutan, and as a kid Meg always cycled through the similar—a hairy little orangutan when they wanted to charm Went (Went was never fooled), and a baboon because the bright red butt was so funny, and howlers when they were throwing a real fit and wanted to punish Mom for sending them to their room—but it’s been years since she clung to him like this. Richie’s a display object of some sort for Nanna, so she’s always on his shoulder or his head or running down his arms to reach out and greet some other dæmon.

Neither of them bother telling the other that it’s gonna be okay, because it’s not.

He sleeps a little. Then he lies in the bed and fucks around on his phone for a while, thinking and trying not to think. When he can tell the sun is going down behind the drawn blinds, he gets up and goes over to the duffle and pulls out Nanna’s jewelry and then looks at his options for clothes.

He just sighs.

“I told you that you were packing like an asshole,” Meg grouches. She drags her necklace around and around in a circle, spinning it on her neck like she’s trying to get out of it.

Richie doesn’t take a shower because fuck that, but he puts on a clean outer shirt and socks. He wears the same jeans and t-shirt he slept in, and he drives the rental car—again, thank you, Carol—out to the Jade of the Orient. When he pulls into the parking lot he sees two people standing in front of the restaurant. His headlights pass over the pair of them and he sees that the woman’s hair is red.

There she is. There’s Bev. He doesn’t know how he knows, just that every memory he has of Beverly Marsh gets suddenly vomited up from the depths of his brain on a delay—Bev’s _I’ll go!_ peeling out of her clothes on the cliff over the quarry; her defiant leap with her dæmon in bird form right beside her, as black and blue iridescent as Bev was red and white in her underwear; Bev with her sunglasses on and her headphones in. Richie suddenly understands the stomach-deep anxiety that hits him whenever he hears “Busta Move” even to this day. Beverly shouting, _Stop it! Stop it!_ at them, Beverly seeing Mike pinned on the ground and lobbing a rock at a bully’s head without question or apparent forethought, Beverly saying _you’ll grow into your looks_ like it’s a consolation prize.

As he gets out of the car he sees the green band wrapped around and around her torso, her shoulders, at first looking like some kind of scarf or harness but twining all the way down her leg. Bev settled. Does he remember Bev settling? He feels he ought to remember, because that’s the biggest snake he’s ever seen, dæmon or no.

The man she’s talking to turns around and—Richie just kind of assumed it was Bill and is struck by the unfamiliarity of his face. Bill had big blue eyes and this guy has big brown eyes and a goatee and good cheekbones, and Richie is flatly uncomprehending before he realizes, “Haystack?”

Ben grins and turns to Bev. “Richie recognized me first.”

“Richie?” Bev says, like she’s confused about it.

Richie can’t blame her. “Bev, Bev, Beverly,” he singsongs, and Bev takes a step back and recognizes Meg.

“Oh my god, Richie, really?” she asks, and Meg cackles in delight in Richie’s ear. “I can’t believe it’s you! I’ve been seeing your movies for years!”

Meg replies, “Well, you said we’d grow into our looks,” and mugs for both of them, hands cupped under her chin and her teeth shining.

Only humans read that display of teeth as a smile, Richie knows. He’s seen Meg do it often enough when she’s not showing off, panicking in their condo back home, so he knows it’s actually an expression fo deep and profound fear.

Bev’s fuck-off-sized snake dæmon was mostly hiding his head under the lapel of her jacket, but now he pulls his snout out from under the little flap of fabric and stretches up towards Meg. It’s always weird watching snakes climb by themselves, Richie’s never gotten used to it. He automatically extends his elbow so Meg can run down his arm and greet the snake, which she does with a smacking kiss on the nose, the same theatrical one she uses to greet costars’ dæmons in public. The glossy olive-green scales shine in the light from the restaurant, studded with asymmetrical black blotches over the coils wrapped around Bev’s neck and shoulders and torso. Behind the snake’s eyes there are bright orange stripes, fiery as Bev’s hair.

Ben says, “Richie,” too good-natured for his own safety as always, and turns to hug Richie around the shoulders. His bird leaps into the air to allow it to happen—long beak like that and buzzy wings, Richie guesses it’s some kind of hummingbird, which seems weird for Ben, but people change in thirty years. He can’t help but glance up at it as he puts his chin on Ben’s shoulder.

“Do you want a kiss too?” he asks, only half-joking, because Ben grew up good-looking enough that if Ben suggested it Richie would skip this whole fucking dinner and take him back to the Townhouse without hesitation. But he remembers how Ben used to moon over Bev—still moons over Bev, if the way he was looking at her when Richie showed up means anything. The whole summer of 1989 the kid had one facial expression and it was mooning over Bev. Richie doesn’t get his hopes up.

“Same old Trashmouth,” Ben sighs as he draws back, but he sounds almost pleased with it.

God, it’s been a long time since Richie’s heard that one.

“Oh no, not even!” Richie protests, because they’re Nanna Records now, not Trashmouth. But Bev smiles too, and when Meg holds out her hand Ben’s little yellow and green bird buzzes down and lands on it, and allows her to kiss the top of her head too before she flies back to Ben.

* * *

It seems Mike has reserved an entire private room for their party. Bev says, “We’re meeting friends here,” and the waitress asks, “Mike Hanlon?” and leads them to a room tucked away behind a decorative arch. Richie spots a real _Romeo + Juliet_ aquarium up against one wall and two men standing turned toward it as though admiring a fish, and then he gets distracted, because the biggest dæmon he’s seen outside of Hollywood is chilling in the corner.

It’s a boar. Five feet long, with a big wedge of a head that ends in a slightly upturned snout, studded with huge canine teeth curling up out of the mouth. The boar sits with its back legs pointing forward on the floor, its front legs looking too little and short and spindly to hold it up. Next to it is a dog dæmon, on the larger end for a dog but nowhere near as big as a goddamn boar. The two of them look tucked clear of the table as though to keep out of the way, and there’s a little crow perched on the dog’s back as though in solidarity.

Richie thinks _Oh fuck_ , but he’s also an idiot and his mouth says without his permission, “Guess we know who has the biggest dick in the room, huh?” and then Eddie Kaspbrak turns around, big gorgeous brown eyes wide and blank and not understanding but also _exactly the same_ as they were when he was a kid, god. Richie thinks _Oh fuck_ for a whole completely different reason. Then Eddie realizes what Richie’s suggesting and his eyes narrow to slits.

Richie’s heart thumps hard in his throat and before he can open his mouth to say anything, Meg reaches out and grabs the mallet for the gong and gives it one hard bash to draw all the attention to her.

“Let the inaugural meeting of the Losers Club of 1989 begin!” she says.

Mike practically leaps across the room in his eagerness to greet them all, immediately identifiable not just as the only black man in the room but also as the tallest person, which is pretty uncommon as far as Richie’s experience goes. He can deal with being eye to eye with Ben—and who saw that coming? Not Richie, certainly—but if he couldn’t be the most famous one in the room, he at least liked to be the tallest. But Mike was always the tallest of them, wasn’t he? Tall and skinny, but strong, because he had chores to do, chores Richie would have complained about sunup and sundown if Maggie and Went saw fit to dispense them to him. Richie was out there whining about having to mow the lawn for two dollars _after_ he’d gotten his allowance money already, and Mike was on the farm, like, picking up sheep and biking around town with his basket full of butcher paper and hefting Eddie up into his bike basket.

He didn’t know he remembered that, actually, but now he can see Eddie’s sullen little face appearing over his folded knees, holding one arm to his chest. It made Richie jealous, because Richie was always jealous when it came to Eddie, but there’s an undercurrent of something else there, something almost like panic. He doesn’t remember why Eddie needed to go in the bike basket but he didn’t question in the moment that he should, and Mike wheeled him down to the street—how far did they take their bikes into the grass?—and Richie watched him go, arm stretched out at a distance like that would do anything at all to help Eddie keep his balance.

Mike’s dæmon was already settled back then, wasn’t it? Richie feels like out of all of them Mike arrived fully-formed as an adult. The second Richie saw it he recognized this dog, with its long black face and its tall pointed ears and—

“Mr. Chips?” Richie says stupidly. It’s pretty rude to address someone’s dæmon directly, but he’s used to it by now—Nanna takes directions, greets fans, carefully signs autographs with Richie accepting the pen from the requester and passing it over to her in a convoluted ritual to avoid actually touching. And Meg’s never been polite, even before she had film credits under her name, so she speaks on her own without prompting. Sometimes people who aren’t warned to expect it—he knows Steve does some glad-handing behind the scenes, as their agent—get taken aback by it.

But Mike just smiles and his dæmon gives a doggy laugh. “God, it’s been a long time since we’ve heard that one. Bill walked in and called me Mikey.” He hugs Richie with what feels like genuine relief, squeezing him hard in a way that shows Mike kept all of that strength into his adulthood.

“Tell me your name isn’t actually Mr. Chips,” Richie says. There are indignities and then there are _indignities_. “I know you’re a goddamn grown-ass man, but I can’t actually remember.”

The dæmon huffs a little, amused, and then says in a decidedly male voice, “Chippenham. You made up that one, Richie.”

And that’s right. Mike had a male dæmon and Richie remembers being thirteen, knowing that happens sometimes and the kid always gets shit for it, always gets the shit kicked out of him for it. So the first time Mike casually introduced his dæmon as _Chips_ Richie was unable to stop himself from pointing out that the dog—who hadn’t spoken yet—had testicles: _I think you mean Mr. Chips!_ It was a way to call attention to it, sure, but mostly because it meant the attention was off him—Meg was female, obviously—and so he could hide under the radar and look in fascination at the other boys, the boys who had male dæmons, and wonder, _What does it mean?_ And _Am I the only one_?

Now he lives in L.A. there are more same-sex dæmons per capita than almost anywhere else in the United States, and half of the guys Richie’s secretly hooked up with in bar bathrooms have female dæmons anyway. Richie-at-thirteen would be disappointed to learn it doesn’t mean a damn thing. But there was always locker room talk, guys nudging Richie in the ribs in college and asking, _What kind of dæmons do you like?_ and Richie never knew how to answer. He’d make some shit up, something about an actress who was popular then, and guys would go on about girls with cute dæmons or girls with predator dæmons ( _that’s the kind of girl you want, one who isn’t shy_ ). Richie didn’t have an answer that wasn’t _male dæmons_.

But wait a minute, his memory can’t be right, because Mike didn’t go to school with them. He did homeschooling or he went to the Baptist school or some shit. The bullies didn’t jump on Mike because he had a male dæmon, they jumped on him because it was open season on Mike Hanlon at all times, year-round. So who is Richie remembering with the same-sex dæmon?

Impossible to tell, looking at Ben and Eddie’s little birds. There was someone else—this table has a place set for a seventh person—and Richie doesn’t know shit about how to tell the gender of a wild boar, and it’s sitting down anyway, he’s not gonna go, _Hey, Bill, can you get your big pig to stand up so I can see if its junk is an innie or an outie?_ Stupid. It doesn’t matter anyway. He’s back in Derry for less than twelve hours and already he’s back on bad habits.

“Sorry,” Richie apologizes to Mr. Chips. “You prefer Chips? I feel like we should be glad I didn’t just go for Chippendale.” Like he knew what a Chippendale dancer was at thirteen. He wouldn't have dared speak of it.

Mike’s dæmon is pretty gorgeous, all golden-brown fur and a black face mask. “I don’t mind,” he says, and it sounds honest, and Meg climbs down Richie—scratching his leather jacket again, the bitch—to go greet him.

“Weren’t you doing press stuff?” Mike asks.

Richie doesn’t know why he’s surprised that Mike knows about his career, but he’s suddenly fiercely pleased by it. It’s been a busy year for them, four movies releasing in 2016 and now they’re taking a break from filming. Mike _should_ know about his movie career. The surprising thing is that Mike also knows his personal phone number, enough to summon him back to Derry.

“Nah, not for now,” Richie says. “It came out in like, the first week, we’ve done a lot of publicity shit.” The girl who’s actually the star of the movie, playing a real live human and everything, is probably still doing some interviews, but a dæmon playing an animal tends to get fewer questions asked about her personality. Everyone knows what happens in show business, but it gets uncomfortable to go onstage and talk about their ability to pretend to be devoid of intelligent thought, though Richie makes a lot of jokes about that.

Bill comes over to hug Richie and says, “Are you in movies, too?”

Richie thinks he remembers having a crush on Bill or something. Bill always hauled him around on the back of his bike, and Richie would press himself flat to Bill’s back, practically screaming with how fast Bill would pedal or take them down a hill. So Bill not knowing about everything that made Richie successful feels a little bit like a kick in the chest.

“Whaddayamean, _too_?” he asks, because how many other movie stars does Bill know?

“My wife,” Bill replies, smiling good-natured. That answers one question about Bill. “We have a house out in L.A. I can’t believe we’ve never, like, stumbled across each other, it’s not as big a town as it looks.”

And that’s true. Richie has no shortage of acquaintances who don’t mind being suckered onto the podcast with him, because everyone does a podcast these days.

“Who’s your wife?” Richie asks. “Who’s the unlucky lady who has to go without heels for the rest of her marriage?”

“Audra Phillips,” Bill replies with a smile, like he’s used to the short jokes. “And she wears heels when she damn well pleases.”

Richie holds Bill out at arm’s length. “No.”

Bill grins, somewhere between shy and proud, nodding.

“You married Audra Phillips? I heard she married some writer who’s too young for her.”

Bill rolls his eyes. “Oh my god, she’s like two years older than me, people have been going on about that one for over a decade.”

“I know her,” Richie says.

Bill grins. “Seriously? How?”

He makes his voice whiny and recites, “ _This one time—at band camp—”_

Bill, grinning, shoves at him. “Aw, man, I thought you meant like you met her at some point.”

“I did!” Richie says. He points at Meg, who has climbed over Mike’s Mr. Chips and onto the back of the boar, apparently engaging in rapid conversation with the crow. “We were in _American Pie_! She was Monkey with Garage Band!”

Dæmons are kind of dimly aware of what conversations their humans are having at all times, but Meg’s response is quick on the draw and full of spite: she points back at Richie and declares, “He was Male Voice in Porn Film!”

The boar dæmon makes a loud huffing noise that sounds like a cough, and Bill falls over into laughter.

“Oh my god, I can’t believe it, I’ll have to ask her if she remembers you.”

“God, I hope not,” Richie says, only half-joking. “How’d you get out to here with an oversize dæmon like that?” It’s a three-day drive from Los Angeles to here, if that’s where Bill was coming from. He can only assume that Audra Phillips has got to be famous enough for her husband to borrow a private jet or something. He’s about to make a joke about Big Bill turning out big where it counts.

Eddie replies, “We drove all night, actually.”

“Completely unsafe,” the boar dæmon agrees, voice low as you would expect from an animal that big, but definitely, definitely male.

Oh _shit_ , the bigass boar dæmon is Eddie’s.

“From where?” Richie asks, trying to keep up. Now he’s embarrassed with the way Meg is standing on the boar’s neck like Richie might lean on someone’s shoulder. The crow is Bill’s; the boar is Eddie’s; the dog is Mike’s; and it’s all too conspicuous for her to be doing that. He glances over and makes eye contact with her, trying to urge her back over to him with nothing more than just his eyebrows, but Meg appears to be chatting seriously and determinedly with the three other dæmons. And then she raises one of her uncanny little hands and throws him the finger.

“New York,” Eddie says.

There’s only one place in New York that matters. “New York _City_?” Richie asks incredulously. How does Eddie get around with an oversize dæmon out there? Better yet, how does Eddie get around the _dirt and germs and rodents_ out there?

Bev breaks off conversation with Bill and says, “Eddie, do you live in New York City too?”

Eddie looks around Richie to make eye contact with her and Richie feels that odd little pulse of jealousy, familiar and unwanted at once. _Look at me, look at me_. Eddie’s boar dæmon huffs again and Richie looks over to find that Meg has tugged on his ear, and that’s enough, they can’t do this, Richie needs a fucking drink. He slides past Eddie around the table and goes over to the corner, lifting Meg up like an errant toddler. She allows it, but only because they’re in public, and she climbs up his shoulders and perches there behind his head like it was her idea all along.

The boar dæmon tilts its massive head— _holy_ shit Richie’s still not used to that, the action still looks like something that ought to be the product of CGI—and fixes him with one small deep-set eye. Richie feels seen—he knows this dæmon, and while he can’t remember Bill’s or Bev’s dæmons’ names, he ought to be able to remember Eddie’s, right? Richie knows for a fact he was fixated on this one all throughout grade school. Something that started with a vowel. Ash…? Ish…?

“Don’t you start,” the boar says, voice low and almost threatening, and it comes back to Richie all at once.

 _“Call me Ishmael!”_ he practically shouts, and the boar huffs once again and Eddie twists around to look at Richie and roll his big brown eyes.

“ _Don’t_ call us that,” Eddie says. “Christ, haven’t you gotten any new jokes in the last thirty fucking years?”

“What was it really?” Richie asks, because he called Eddie _Eds_ and Chippenham _Mr. Chips_ and he knows just enough to guess that Mrs. Kaspbrak probably didn’t actually name her son Ishmael.

“Ishme _rai_ ,” Eddie growls, the grievance old and familiar and somehow, incredibly comforting. And he looks at Richie, eyes squinting like he’s trying to remember something too, and then points at them. “Meginhard! I knew that bullshit wasn’t actually your name, no one names their kid’s dæmon _Nanna_.”

No one names their kid’s dæmon Meginhard, either, but his dad’s name was Wentworth and Richie lost out in the middle name department too, so they might as well.

“Why don’t we sit down?” Mike suggests. “Is anyone hungry?”

Richie hasn’t eaten all day. He needs a fucking drink.

* * *

Walking tour, walking tour. Clearly Mike has never seen a horror movie in his life, with how he suggests splitting up the gang. And considering he’s the only black man, you’d think he’d want the safety of numbers. “We can all meet back up at my place later,” he said with a kindly smile, as if Richie, drunk, was able to consider where that was now.

He’ll be fine. His fancy watch has a compass on it. He can just start making his way north to Canada and then, when they arrest him, try to get shipped back to Los Angeles.

But a walking tour to refresh their memories— _sure_ he’ll go on a walking tour, why the fuck not? Not like those memories stayed buried for a reason. Not like they don’t have exact confirmation of what happens when you remember too much, too soon.

Stanley.

Stan settled that summer, Richie remembers it clearer than any of the rest of them, though from how familiar Bill’s crow’s shiny iridescence feels he doubts Stan was the only one. Richie went to his bar mitzvah, but he also went with Stan to the library, on _purpose_ , to look up what exact species Stan’s dæmon settled as. Richie can’t quite picture her, but he remembers some of the gory details Stan read aloud to him—quietly, modeling an inside voice for him.

“The time between molts is called—” Stan said; Richie can’t remember the word that came next, it was too technical and not interesting enough and did not survive the change of twenty-seven years. But Stan’s dæmon molted at some point, and birds are the most common form of dæmon in the world, it wouldn’t surprise Richie if Stan rounded out the group with three to match Bill’s crow and Ben’s little yellow bird.

But then he remembers Stan going on, reading from the encyclopedia without looking up: “The shedding of the exoskeleton occurs through the formation of a soft exoskeleton inside the current one. Once the old exoskeleton is shed, the new larger one begins to harden.” Then another technical word that Richie doesn’t remember clearly. “—occurs when the spider’s mass becomes too great for its current exoskeleton to support.”

Richie walks down to the old Aladdin theater. Mike wants a memory tour? That’s his memory, right there. Stan the man with his little protective lanyard for his insect dæmon, something small, but something that sheds its bones when things become too big for it to handle. Fuck Mike for dumping this on them.

Except—except—except he knows it isn’t Mike’s fault. And this isn’t too big for them all to handle—at least, it wouldn’t be if Stan were here, if there were seven of them and their circle was complete. It’s exactly big enough for the seven of them to handle, because they did it once, didn’t they?

It’s night, but there’s some man handing out some kind of flyer in Bassey Park. Richie, accustomed to avoiding well-meaning people who’d like to talk about the environment, nods without making eye contact and hopes the guy doesn’t call the cops on the dude about to break into the old abandoned theater and arcade.

Meg, not having fingerprints, reaches out and tries to open the door, but she weighs maybe nine pounds tops and the door is boarded. Richie sighs, wraps his hand around the handle, and pulls hard. He feels nails detach and the door opens.

He wishes it were more difficult, actually. The certainty that this is where he needed to go hurts almost as bad as the bite wound Meg put into his hand.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that it’s just how he remembers it. For one thing, it’s dark. He takes his phone out and shakes it to make the flashlight come on, and then he sees the peeling paint and the dust motes moving in the fine beam of light. _Eddie would hate it here_ , he thinks without prompting, remembering how horrified Eddie was by dirt and grime. But it’s not like Richie loves it in this place either. Good thing it was Richie’s traumatic memory that happened here and not Eddie’s, right? Eddie would never go in to get the token and then they’d all be doomed. He catches himself smiling as he thinks it.

Eddie would never have been humiliated by Bowers like that here. Eddie was tormented all the time for what people thought of him, but it was never for the things that he did out of his own stupidity. Eddie was small and clean and liked things to be neat and hated getting dirty, but he never fucked up and tripped over his own tongue like Richie did, always does. None of the simpering _We can go again if you want,_ no hopeful stares. Eddie would have been angry about losing, _Give me your quarter, I bet you can’t fucking do it again_. And he would have sanitized the joystick with baby wipes before he deigned to touch it, but once he got his hand around it he played like a savage, his teeth bared like if Richie came too close to him he would bite.

His memories are blurring together. Is that what you wanted, Mike? Gonna take Richie’s worst memories, the most traumatic ones, and mix them together with the good ones until he can’t tell them all apart?

“Shut up,” Meg hisses in his ear, back on his shoulders again. He suspects her eyesight is better than his, but they’ve never tested it or anything; he’s just relieved that his dæmon doesn’t need glasses either. She looks around and says, “There,” and Richie points his phone in the direction she’s indicating. There’s the dispenser.

_I’ve got another quarter. We can go again? If you want._

“Why are you being weird?” Meg asks, a little more ferocious.

Richie says, “I’m not being weird, I’m doing what I’m supposed to.”

“You’re supposed to get the fucking token and get out,” Meg snaps back at him. Richie remembers how vulnerable his ears are and wonders if she’s going to bite him again. “Come on. Do you have a fucking quarter?”

“That thing can’t be stocked.”

“Yeah, and nobody put an eyeball in that fortune cookie on purpose,” Meg says. “We’re way past cause and effect here.”

Richie feels like he’s standing in a laundromat as he walks over to the dispenser that changes quarters for tokens. He gets out his wallet—no change, of course there’s no change in it, if you stuff it full of coins it won’t fold up flat and it’s not worth his time to remember about coins anyway, if he gets them back when he pays cash for something he dumps them in a tip jar and it’s not because he’s a nice philanthropic guy, it’s because he doesn’t have the patience. He doesn’t even want a receipt. He digs in the pockets of his jeans, of his jacket, and then he starts laughing, and Meg realizes what’s happening too and she starts laughing as well, tipping sideways into him.

Here’s Richie Tozier, forty years old, one of the most successful actors in the world. Here is Meginhard called Nanna, wearing diamonds around her neck, the most powerful dæmon in Hollywood per the _Los Angeles Times_ , and neither of them have a quarter to spare.

“This place is a fucking dump anyway,” Richie says, kicking one of the vacant arcade cabinets, long-dead. “Always was.”

He remembers being grateful his dæmon had hands, that summer. Not because he was like Stan, with parents who expected him to follow in his father’s footsteps and go to medical school or something; oh no. Instead it was because Meg could get on the cabinet and wield a joystick and play _Street Fighter_ with him herself, and they never had to ask anyone else to do it again.

“Hang on,” Meg says, her eyes sharper than his, leaning forward on his shoulder. He stoops so she can view the dispenser, and after a moment she reaches out and grabs something off the top of the metal frame where it’s set into the wall. He lowers his phone so he can use the light from the screen to see what she has, instead of blinding her with the flashlight, and sure enough, there’s a quarter.

Richie wonders what it would say if he checked the year it was minted. He suspects he doesn’t want to know.

“Okay,” he says, though he doesn’t want to touch it, and takes it from her. It feels as cold and unexceptional as any other coin he’s touched in his life, no beating heart hidden inside it, no alien heat, nothing to suggest it’s alive. He uses the flashlight function to find the _Insert coin_ slot.

“God, what if this was our quarter?” he whispers to Meg.

“You’re making it worse,” she says, as if she’s some paragon of healthy behavior. He almost points that out to her, but then he just pushes the coin into the slot. He hears it clunk down into the belly of the dispenser.

Meg reaches out and turns the dial, and something clinks into the little dish. Far lighter than the quarter, he can tell just by the tenor of it. Richie moves the beam of light from the flashlight down and reaches in to fish out the token.

 _No Cash Value_ it reads on the other side.

He turns it so that Meg can read it too. “Just like me!” he says brightly.

“You got that right,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”

He puts the token in his jeans pocket—for some reason he’s anxious about the possibility of it falling out of his jacket—and they move toward the door again. Richie feels nervous as he passes by all the dead arcade cabinets—was this place just abandoned wholesale? No one even thought to steal the game cabinets, or to try to sell them for scrap? He keeps the light on his phone not because he needs it to see how to get out of this place, but because he’s afraid that suddenly one of the screens will light up and the fucking clown will invite him to play a game, _Insert token here_.

He wonders what Mike’s going to say when he shows up with a literal token. Once a teacher, having called in a conference with Maggie and Wentworth to discuss Richie’s behavior, said, _He follows the letter of instructions, but not the spirit of them. Clearly he has no willingness to learn._

 _I don’t know about that,_ Went said. _Richie always puts the most amount of effort into doing the least amount of work. Sounds like you need clearer instructions and to close your loopholes, if you want to make him learn how to get around that too._

Both the teacher and Richie’s mother were unimpressed.

“Walking tour, Mike?” Richie mutters. “I got your walking tour right here.” He opens the door to the Aladdin, having every intention of calling a rideshare or a taxi or something to take him to the Townhouse to sleep it off and then to pick up his car later. Do they even have Uber drivers out here in the middle of nowhere? It can’t be as easy as it is in L.A.

With Richie’s luck, actually, the car would probably pull up with the clown behind the steering wheel. Richie decides actually he’d better walk back to the restaurant. Maybe back to the Townhouse entirely.

There are lights in Bassey Park.

The bandstand—newly renovated or something back in 1989 for the Fourth of July festivities, the marching band and the parade and the pinwheels and the ice cream—is in much better condition than the abandoned Aladdin theater. Richie’s willing to bet they used it for their Canal Days festival, their traveling amusement park with its shoddy Ferris wheel and its rigged games and its acid sparkling lights. Right where a guy got lynched on the Kissing Bridge. There’s none of that now—just two bright white lights illuminating the white paint, and then the shining pale wood on the stage. It’s empty. The guy who was handing out flyers is still sitting there, his silhouette black against the bright light.

Time to go. Richie remembers enough about Derry to know that this is bad news. He shakes his phone so that the flashlight flicks off and makes to hightail it back to the Jade of the Orient or the Derry Townhouse. He doesn’t know which is closer. Eddie would know, but Richie’s drunk and slow. He’ll have to take the long way around to avoid Bassey Park anyway and he doesn’t care at this point, he’s just got to get out.

“And now,” says a female voice, cheerful and coaxing like an announcer trying to convince an excited crowd to pace itself. “Please welcome to the stage—a real old-fashioned street performer, brought here from the faraway land of Los Angeles, California—”

Shit.

But she doesn’t say _Pennywise the Dancing Clown_ or _Richie Tozier_. Instead she says, “Bob Gray on the street organ!”

The man who walks up the little set of stairs to the stage is tall and pale, with a pointed triangular face and his hair swept back. He’s wearing a little flat-topped hat and lugging what looks like a big box of an organ, one wooden leg extending from its base to help him take some of its weight off the strap over his neck.

It’s perfectly believable as the kind of performance that might go on in Bassey Park’s bandstand. If you ignore the fact that it’s nighttime, there’s only one person in the audience, and that the man has no dæmon visible.

They knew what the clown was the first time they saw it. _Monster, soulless_. And it can imitate things, it can mimic Bill’s dead little brother, but it never mastered the knack of appearing to have two bodies.

The man—from across the street, all the way in the park—seems to turn so that his face is pointed toward Richie’s, and he begins turning the dial for the street organ. What comes out is a tinny mechanical take on the guitar riff that Richie recognizes as Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” its tune picked out in the pipes exposed from the organ itself. The man bobs his head and slaps the wooden case when the beat comes in, shouting, “Yeah!” in a voice that is unfamiliar to Richie, neither Pennywise’s nor Bruce’s. The guy in the audience yells, “Whoo!” with the organ grinder, and the guy turns in rhythm and then begins singing.

_“I had a friend was a big baseball player back in high school.”_

Richie turns and starts walking back the way he came. He’s not getting sucked into this. Meg is in his ear whispering, “Run, run,” but Richie has the longer legs and he knows better than to call too much attention to himself.

 _“…in the wink of a young girl’s eye—_ what young girl, Richie?” the grinder calls after him, and Richie suddenly can’t move. “What young girl?” He hears the guy behind him, the music continuing to go around and around without any singing. “Why, Bev, of course. Not such a young girl anymore. And didn’t you have a friend who was a big baseball player? Wasn’t Stan the Man a big baseball player, Richie?”

Richie gags and Meg says, “Don’t you dare, not here, just get out of here,” but Richie doesn’t know how to explain to her that he can run but It’ll chase him.

“I know a guy who likes big baseball players,” the organ grinder says, as the music goes on and on in the background. Springsteen wasn’t meant to be tormented like this. “You want me to tell you who likes big baseball players, Richie?” The voice is warping and becoming more familiar, higher pitched and mottled and clownish. “You want me to give him your number, Richie? I don’t think you care about young _girls_.”

The music warps and it’s no longer “Glory Days,” it’s becoming fast and warped like fiddle music, sounding the way spiders skittering looks, the way skin crawling feels, and then it smoothes out, sawing up and down. A distinctly nonhuman voice sings, _“I know your secret, your dirty little secret! I know your secret, your DIRTY LITTLE SECRET!”_

“It’s not real,” Richie whispers to Meg. “It’s not real.”

“And the coin’s not real, and the dispenser’s broken, and that fortune cookie wasn’t really looking at you,” Meg whispers.

“You wanna get Nanna up here?” Pennywise sings at him. “She can play the organ and you can hold the cup! I’ve got another quarter here somewhere! I’ve got another quarter if you want to go again! If you want!”

“It’s not real,” Richie says, his heart sinking. “It’s not real.”

“No? It’s not real, Richie?” It stretches out the vowels, turning _Richie_ into _Reechie_. “You don’t want to take a turn? You don’t want to play? Nobody wants to play with the clown anymore.”

Meg bites down hard on Richie’s ear. The pain shocks him out of his standstill and he starts running. He can’t feel his legs, he just feels wetness coursing down his neck, into his hair—shit, she got him good—and as they run Meg stands up on Richie’s shoulder and screams at It. Not her voice, not her Nanna voice, just an animal shriek.

It doesn’t seem to care. It just keeps playing, keeps singing: _“I know your secret, your dirty little secret.”_

* * *

Bowers’s body is in the web in Its lair. Richie looks and sees the blood in the sandy brown hair, the groove where the tomahawk thudded into his skull and reverberated up into Richie’s arms, and Richie’s not sorry for it still, not with Eddie with those two pinpricks from that viper’s kiss still in his cheek, but the fact that It went and got the body is—

“Something’s wrong!” Bev screams. “Something’s wrong! Do something!”

Bill’s eyes roll back up in his head—they’ve been here before—showing not as eerie white as Bev’s did on that long ago day, but riddled with the red veins of a living person, and Bill’s crow spreads her wings wide and begins to float. Not to fly, not like bird dæmons seem meant to do but almost invariably prove incapable of—but floating, her wings spread wide. Blood drips from Bill’s nose.

“Shit,” Richie whispers, as It turns, grinning, ready to strike at Bill while his mind’s elsewhere, ready to kill his body so that he has nowhere to return to—

And, with the same blind fury with which she threw herself on Bowers’s viper, Meg lunges for Bill.

“You wanna play? You wanna play, motherfucker, I’ll play!” she screams. “I’ll play, only it’s my show, it’s my show all the way, Richie Tozier’s All-Dead Rock Show and you’re about to be the motherfucking headliner, you sloppy bitch, you wanna fucking dance, I’ll show you dancing and—”

Richie loves her, loves her, loves her with a ferocity he hasn’t felt in a long time, his throat open and a laugh pouring out of him, out from so deep in his body it seems to come from his feet or maybe from the ground below him—isn’t that what they say the world is made of? Isn’t it turtles all the way down?

He’s blasted out of his body. Darkness, no spinning lights. He can’t see anything but he can hear himself laughing, can hear Meg screeching half words and half capuchin fury, and their teeth catch, their teeth sink in. It tries to shake them off, but Meg knows how to bite, they’ve had plenty of practice, and Richie knows how to bleed, knows how to hold pain deep in his body. He’s flying. Meg can leap, Meg can climb, Meg can sail from tree to tree, but here they are, really flying together.

_Bill! Bill, can you hear me? We’re going real fast now, Bill! You better get on Silver, because hi-yo, Big Bill, you better skedaddle, better get out of here, I’m big enough for both of us now._

And Its venomous response: _He’s dead, he’s mine, you’re too late, let go! Let me go!_

 _Richie?_ Bill asks. His voice is thin and dark as feathers. _Richie?_

_—it’s too late, you’re too old, you’re not strong enough—_

Richie hears himself laugh, wild. _Well now sweet thirteen’s turned forty-one, feeling a little tired, feeling under the gun, well, all of Chuck’s children are out there playing his licks, get into your kicks! You called us back, bitch, and we’re here to finish the job, rock and roll never forgets—_

He can feel Its pain thumping through his body. He surprised It; It thought It was only going to have to put Bill down, but doesn’t It know that one’s for sorrow but two’s for joy? Doesn’t It know that capuchins live in large groups, that they’re territorial animals, that Bill Denbrough is and always has been Richie’s? Doesn’t it know that Richie’s killed once for these Losers _today_ and he’ll do it again.

_Hey, Bill, want me to show you how you write a fucking ending, you hack, you jackass, I love you, get over here._

And Bill, voice stronger, louder, closer: _Shoulda known you do what you always do, you start talking—_

 _Yeah, honey, it’s a gift,_ Richie says, stretching out his hand, and Bill grabs it. Richie’s fingers close over Bill’s, over his wedding ring which is burning hot, hot in the way he was afraid the token was going to be hot.

 _Who do you think you’re calling honey?_ Bill asks, voice wry, glowing face in the spotlight grinning. _I’ll have you know I’m a married man, Trashmouth._

And Richie—

—slips.

Bill grabs him by the shirt collar, the same ferocity with which he grabbed Eddie in the kitchen of Neibolt house, furious. _I got you! Richie, hang on, I got you!_

But he can hear It laughing again, trying to shake them off, knowing It didn’t even have to hurt Richie, Bill did that, Bill said the wrong thing and Richie opened up a great wound in himself made of fear and paranoia and regret and—

 _Help me!_ Meg screams. _I’m losing! Help me! Somebody help us!_

And then It _screams_. Not the way a human or an animal screams, but the way a dying star screams, and Richie hits hard on the ground, the wind knocked out of him, the cavern ceiling far above him. Bill’s nowhere to be found—he gropes uselessly with his free hand but he barely has the strength to raise it, and when he looks he can see Bill far away over there, also on his ass, with Meg far over there too, far beyond their usual range, no wonder he hurts so bad.

“Richie!” Eddie shouts, and then he’s over him, hands on Richie’s chest, leaning down to look into his face. “I got It! I think I got It, I think I killed It!” His face is bright and alight with joy and he looks ageless, forget the bandage on his cheek, forget the scowl lines carved into his forehead. Eddie’s all big brown eyes, all pretty lashes, just fucking ageless.

He heard Richie scream. He heard Richie scream and reached out to save him. Nobody’s ever reached out to save him before, he’s a big guy, he doesn’t need help, he’s just a sideshow compared to the main act, but he went in after Bill and Eddie went in after him.

Its voice splits the cavern. The rage in it shakes the stones, causes stalactites to drop and shatter like icicles. There’s no pain in it, just fury when it says, “YOU WANT TO GO HUNTING, EDDIE-BEAR? OKAY. LET’S GO HUNTING.”

And then Eddie goes stiff, elbows locking, face going blank. Richie looks for a wound automatically, or waits for Eddie’s eyes to roll up in his head, but Eddie just looks shocked.

Behind them, Bev screams, _“No!”_

And Eddie drops on top of Richie. Richie grabs at him immediately, trying to sit up and hardly able to breathe, but as soon as Eddie’s clear Richie can see past him.

The boar is in the center of the cavern, very still, staring at It. And one of Its stingers, the long legs that it tried to drive into Mike, that Bill had to drag him away from, is driven through the boar’s shoulders, all the way down its back along the line of its mane, to pin it to the stone behind.

Richie has never seen a dæmon bleed blood in real life before—in movies, sure, when they’re wounded, but everyone knows that when a dæmon dies it vanishes into a puff of gold dust, and the loss kills the human too. Eddie’s trembling, going white with shock already. Richie holds onto him, watching the boar behind him open its mouth in shock.

It splays its little feet and legs. Richie can’t stand to watch it drop, to hear it hit the ground, and he grabs Eddie by the face, trying to make Eddie look at him with those sightless eyes. “Eddie. Eddie, stay with me. Eddie.”

“No crossguard,” Eddie whispers, his voice fine as a hair, like he’s having an asthma attack and can’t breathe for real.

“What?” Richie asks, ducking his head forward so his ear’s level with Eddie’s mouth, so Eddie can whisper it to him.

“Mistake,” Eddie gasps.

And the boar drives forward.

The stinger goes straight through him—there’s another gout of blood as it punches through the other side of his body, but he doesn’t even seem to notice, screaming a piercing cry as he drives forward. He follows the line of the stinger like a shower curtain rattling along on the rod, and It tries to stagger back and away, but the long tusk-like canines drive into the leg and severs it clean from the body, a spray of black ichor bursting across his bristly brown face. The boar’s long triangular head hooks _under_ the spidery body and throws It like a shovel throwing dirt, and It flies back and lands on the ground, and the boar stoops, heedless of the spear still driven through its back, and runs for It again.

“Holy _shit_!” Mike shouts, and the next thing Richie knows his Malinois goes streaking across the cavern floor with a snarl, and then there’s a whispery sound as something huge moves over stone. Bev’s dæmon has unwound itself from her body at last, and it’s longer than It is wide, moving toward It with an inevitability that has Richie practically shaking. Meg cackles the way she did in the parking lot when Bev recognized her, satisfied, pleased.

Eddie takes in a small shuddering breath.

“Hey,” Richie says, snapping back to him, holding his face in both hands. “It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay. You got It—you _really_ got It, you’re killing It back there, you’re—”

Eddie smiles with his thin mouth, his lips trembling. “Richie,” he says. “You know I… I…”

And then his eyes roll back in his head and he goes completely limp.

“Shit,” Richie says, and slaps Eddie on the cheek. “Eds. Eddie. Eddie!”

“It’s getting away!” Mike screams, and Richie looks up. The boar is still on his feet, but only barely.

“No it’s not!” Chips roars back, a deep lupine growl that makes Richie’s legs, despite how he’s lying down, feel weak.

“No,” Bev says, her voice low and calm. “It’s not.”

Richie gets his fumbling hands on Eddie’s throat, trying to fit his fingertips under his jaw to find his pulse. It’s there—it’s rapid, it’s faint—are pulses supposed to be that faint? Richie’s never tried taking one that wasn’t his own—and then Bill is crouching beside Richie and Eddie.

“Come on, Rich,” Bill says. “Get him up.”

“I’m trying,” Richie says, shaking Eddie again, but Bill shakes his head and reaches out for Eddie, fitting his hands under his armpits, taking his weight on his own shoulders. Eddie’s little but he’s bigger than Bill, and he ran to Richie, and Meg screeches again as Richie feels a fury he can’t even countenance as Bill tries to lift Eddie away, but—

“I can’t carry him,” Bill says. “You gotta get up.”

Richie doesn’t know when he got is breath back but he gets his feet under him, standing Eddie up on two feet like a drunk friend, making Eddie wrap his arms around his neck, and then Richie gives up entirely and swings Eddie’s legs up into his arms. He’s heavier than Richie thought he would be, but Richie doesn’t care.

Bill turns to look at Bev, standing in the cavern. There’s an eerie light from somewhere—not the deadlights, maybe not even the sunlight at the top of the web, because it seems to be coming from under her—and Bev’s face is lit by pale green, like sun off the water.

“Can you chase It?” Bill asks. “We have to get him out of here.”

“Go,” Bev says. “Last time pays for all. We’ll get It. And if he dies—I’ll… I’ll haunt your ghosts.”

Richie carries Eddie, body heavy, over to where the boar is sitting, just like he did in the restaurant except for how he’s panting. There’s a clear line driven straight down his back, a neat scoop where It tore a line out of him. Richie has the nonsensical memory of learning about vectors in physics or maybe pre-calculus—this is an injury with direction and magnitude. Meg bounds up on her knuckles, Bill’s crow hanging absurdly on her shoulder and trying to keep its balance as she leaps over.

“Hey, Ishmael,” Richie says. “We’re going. Come on.”

Ishmerai pants. “Don’t call me that. Can’t climb,” he reminds Richie. “Have to go out through the pipes.”

“Then we’ll go out through the pipes,” Richie says.

“It’ll take too long,” the boar says, its voice low and hoarse.

“Then we better get going,” Bill says, and Big Bill’s word is law. His crow dæmon flies up to his shoulders, one wing moving stiffly like it’s hurt—the left one, and Richie remembers how he grabbed Bill’s hand, the one with the wedding ring on it—and wonders somehow if he hurt the crow by squeezing hard enough to stop Bill from slipping away.

The boar gives a mighty groan as he stands, and his steps are clumsy and tottering, but he turns to look at them like, _What? This way?_

“Richie,” Meg says. She climbs up him carefully, picking up the denim of his jeans and the leather of his jacket and twining around to the other side, where she can look at Eddie’s head lolling on Richie’s shoulder.

They walk into the dark. The boar leads the way, hooves landing heavy on the dark clay of the earth. Eddie gets heavier and heavier with each step, and Richie’s back and arms dissolve entirely, vanishing into the ache of his body. _He’s dead,_ he keeps thinking, _Eddie’s dead_ , but then he hears the step of the boar ahead of them and knows it’s not true, knows they have to keep going.

It’s the only thing they have to do. Just keep going.

Richie’s head is full of _You know I… I…_ and the little image of an organ grinder monkey, going around and around in a circle, playing the same old tune over and over again.

The boar sits down heavy. There’s a faint splash as his hindquarters sink into the water.

“No,” Richie says immediately, certain that this is it, that the boar can go no further, that Eddie’s about to die because neither Meg nor the crow can carry out this massively oversized dæmon, that if they were different people, if they were stronger it would be—

“Relax,” the boar says, its voice echoing oddly in the pipe. And then, quieter, determined: “Come on, Eds.”

There is a great trembling of the ground all around them, Richie staggering into the side to press his hand against the concrete, afraid he’ll drop Eddie in the tremor and be unable to pick him up; and Bill reaches out and either lends his own strength to steadying Eddie or outright steadies himself on Richie. Then it passes over them, leaving just silence and the sound of rushing water.

And then, with a sound like a wheeze from a sucking chest wound, Eddie gasps awake.

* * *

The Losers unanimously agree to allow Richie to see Eddie first. He gets one visitor at a time—there would be two, normally, but Sovereign Light Hospital is already cramped. They’re harboring a lot of transfer patients from Derry Home Hospital and more injured during the earthquake. Eddie’s not the only one whose dæmon took a serious hit, and they’ve called in emergency surgeons from Canada to help handle all of their triage cases. Eddie was conscious when they brought him in, if obviously confused. Richie watched him help guide his boar onto the emergency gurney and then follow the medical team with the feeling that he was watching Eddie walk back into Its lair, and this time he wouldn’t see him again.

He’s a little embarrassed, deep down, to be so transparent about his need to see Eddie. But none of the Losers seem to mind. Mike’s a little dazed—on top of his knife wound from Bowers, Chips got thrown into a wall at some point in the final kill, and they have a concussion. He looks happy enough not to get up.

Richie asked, “Ben, what the fuck did you and the hummingbird do down there?” He could see how Eddie’s and Mike’s and Bev’s dæmons can be killers when they need to be, but Ben’s little green and yellow dæmon is even less substantial than Bill’s bird.

She tilted her head in a very human gesture from where she perched atop one of Bev’s dæmons many thick coils. “I’m a spiderhunter, jackass,” she said, her voice high-pitched and indignant, which made Richie laugh until he cried.

Eddie’s awake when Richie ducks behind the medical curtain separating the beds. There’s just a nametag on the outside that says, _Kaspbrak, E. and Ishmerai._ Eddie’s not even in a hospital bed, just the boar, and Eddie’s sitting on a chair beside him with his hand stroking over the boar’s big flap of an ear. When Richie pushes the curtain aside he looks up and smiles.

“Hey,” Eddie says.

Richie bursts into tears.

“Oh for the love of Christ,” Meg says, leaping down from his shoulder to his hip and then pushing off him to land on the bed. The wheels are locked—of course, the boar’s fucking huge, can’t have giant pigs rolling down the hospital wards—and she inspects the carefully-laid stitches in his back as though to remind them all that, had she chosen to, she could have gone to medical school.

“Why are you crying?” Eddie demands, looking as appalled as Richie feels.

Richie clenches his jaw in shame and ducks his head. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry.” He tries to get himself back in order, but his breath keeps hitching—he’s bypassing normal weeping and going straight into hysterics, with the awful sobs he can’t stop his lungs from drawing.

“It’s okay, Richie,” Eddie says. He gets up and goes over to him and hugs him, and Richie hugs back because he doesn’t know what else to do but sling himself over Eddie’s shoulders and hang on for dear life. “Hey, wanna know something cool?”

“Uh-huh,” Richie sobs, disgusting.

Eddie tilts his head back and taps on the bandage on his own cheek. “I’m immune to snake venom.”

Richie blinks, shocked enough to quiet for a moment. “Like, because they gave you antivenin?” he asks. He has only the dimmest idea about how medicine works, no matter what Meg claims about their natural talent for surgery ( _oh my god, Meg, you have hands, it’s not a big deal, I have hands too_ ).

“No, because of him.” Eddie points at Ishmerai, who is definitely unconscious on the gurney, chest rising and falling as he breathes. “Mongooses, honey badgers, hedgehogs, and pigs—all have these mutations in this neurotransmitter receptor that means snake venom can’t bind. It means I also can’t get addicted to smoking.”

“You smoke?” Richie asks, feeling like the foundations of his world are shifting. God it would be hot to see Eddie with a cigarette in his mouth, but that’s maybe because Richie quit smoking back in the early 2000s and he’s kind of regretting that now.

“No, it’s just the same receptor that snake venom binds to. Isn’t that cool?” Eddie looks up at him, big-eyed and waiting for Richie to affirm that, yes, that is cool.

Richie starts crying again.

“Aw, Rich.” Eddie hugs him again, hard. “I thought that would cheer you up.”

“It did,” Richie admits, but Eddie shouldn’t be cheering him up. It’s Richie and Meg’s job to cheer everyone else up, always has been, and Eddie and Ishmerai actually got seriously hurt. “How are you alive?”

Eddie snorts. “Fucker only got us in the subcutaneous tissue. It’s made to protect the vital organs—here, look—” Eddie turns and brushes a hand over the boar’s back, close to the stitches. The doctors shaved him down to treat him, and now instead of the long bristles, there’s short fluffy fur visible at the edges of the bare patch. It looks soft. Richie can’t see any subcutaneous tissue, but Meg reaches out and touches the fur very carefully with just her fingertips, then looks back up at Richie knowingly.

Eddie is also watching him. Expectantly, almost. Like he’s waiting for Richie to put a hand down on his dæmon.

Richie knots his hands into fists to stop himself. Eddie looks almost… disappointed?

Part of Nanna’s job is playing animals rather than dæmons. She’s slapped Ben Stiller across the face multiple times. She’s crawled all over Robin Williams, to Richie’s utter mortification. That’s one thing, that’s their job, it doesn’t mean anything—but once in a while you see a fan who’s too excited to care about the taboo, someone who reaches out to grab at Meg like they’ve forgotten she’s a dæmon at all. Meg’s learned to leap out of the way. She only had to learn once.

And Richie’s spent his whole life looking at Eddie but not touching.

“You said,” Richie says. “You said, _You know I_. But then you didn’t finish. And I don’t know. You said that I know, but I don’t.”

Eddie looks at him like he’s a crazy person, and maybe he is, maybe he should go back to the waiting room and let one of the others come to see him.

“I love you,” Eddie says, like it’s obvious.

It hits Richie with the weight of a falling safe. He bites down on nothing. Bill said it too, when they were in some kind of life or death supernatural bullshit. It doesn’t mean anything. Richie carried Eddie out of a scary situation, Richie held him when he got hurt—Richie didn’t even do anything. Ishmerai nearly single-handedly killed It for them, and then Eddie walked out of the big pipe in the sewer under his own power. Forty-eight hours ago, Richie didn’t remember that Eddie Kaspbrak was even alive.

He scrunches his whole face shut, trying to stop tears from leaking out. “I love you too, man. We all do.”

“No,” Eddie says, a huff in his voice like he’s annoyed with Richie. “God, you—like this.” He reaches up and grabs Richie’s face, and Richie’s both too baffled to respond and distracted by the memory of holding Eddie’s face like that, Eddie smiling, Eddie saying _I got It, I think I killed It,_ and Richie thinking, _maybe, maybe_.

And then Eddie goes up on his toes to kiss him.

Richie breathes hard through his nose like Eddie’s punched him instead, and then he grabs Eddie by the flaps of his filthy jacket and drags him in tight, kisses him frantically, mouth opening in desperation, because if this is all he gets he’s taking everything with him. Eddie doesn’t seem to mind, tilting forward so his weight’s leaning into Richie’s body, half-pulling Richie down so he doesn’t have to stretch up on his toes anymore. Richie has the sudden fear that Eddie’s pulling away and he gets an arm around the small of Eddie’s back and pulls him off-balance to make him cling back, and Eddie gasps into his mouth, and—

“Really?” Ishmerai asks. “Right in front of my sickbed?”

Eddie breaks the kiss by tilting his head back, and Richie, gone a little bit insane, almost follows the curve of his throat down. Eddie hasn’t shaved since yesterday and there’s stubble starting up dark along his pale jaw; he wants to drag his cheek against it, feel that scrape against his skin.

“Well, you could have told him while I was unconscious,” Eddie says, voice half an octave deeper than before he and Richie started kissing. It lands in the pit of Richie’s stomach and he wants to curl up around it. He wants to pick Eddie up—or maybe drop him back into the chair and climb on top of him.

“I’m sorry, I was too busy trying to save our lives,” Ishmerai says. “Also, the presence of Bill Denbrough, despite what you thought at eleven, doesn’t really set a romantic mood.”

Meg chitters in actual laughter for her, covering her mouth to hide her teeth from view. Eddie, already lightly flushed, blushes so deep from ears to neck that Richie pushes his face into Eddie’s collarbone, searching for the little hollow at the base of his throat with the tip of his nose. It’s gonna smear the hell out of his glasses and be absolutely worth it.

“Oh my god, you’re worse,” Ishmerai sighs.

“Okay, okay, _oh_ -kay,” Eddie says, reaching out and grabbing hold of the back of the chair like Richie’s not gonna catch the little moan in there and chase it. He looks back up at Richie and kisses him on the lips again—hard, close-mouthed, perfectly Eddie—and then sits down determinedly again. “So. We’re gonna have to drive to L.A.—I can’t fly with him, and also I hate your rental car, so do you want to come with me when they let me out or… If. I. Uh.”

Richie realizes what Eddie’s missing, aside from Richie’s tongue in his mouth, and then says, “No, yeah, I love you too.” God, that sounds so stupid. “I mean—I’m in love with you. Like, the second I saw you in the—that’s why I had to—” He mimes Meg banging the gong in the restaurant again. “But hell yes, move in with me, we can go on a roadtrip. What do you drive? You said you drove up here? I’ll wait to go back until you’re discharged. Do you have, uh, stuff you want to pick up, or…?”

“We’ll buy you new stuff,” Meg says quickly. “We have a lot of money he doesn’t know how to use. We’ll get a cleaning service. Do you like diamonds? You would look good in diamonds.”

Eddie chokes and Ishmerai lets out what sounds like the suid answer to a cough. “Which of us?”

“Either. Both,” Meg says.

Forget Eddie’s cute little blush; Richie’s face is just _burning_.

“What am I, a rapper?” Eddie asks, incredulous.

“My watch has a compass on it,” Richie offers stupidly. It’s not a diamond, but it seems like the kind of thing Eddie would like.

“I—” Eddie grimaces. “I have watches, I’m not moving in with you because I want you to buy me things.”

“It’s German,” Meg says.

“Why?” Eddie asks, sounding like _what is the point of German watches?_ “You buy lenses from Germany; you buy watches from Switzerland.”

“I love you,” Richie says again, stupidly.

Eddie grins, and his face just looks young when he’s happy, it’s not the ageless horror effect from down in the cavern. He has dimples. They’re so cute. Richie hopes that the bandage on his cheek doesn’t hurt. “I love you, too,” he says.

From behind the curtain, a woman says, “Yes, I’m very glad that you both love each other, can you do this somewhere else?”

* * *

**Epilogue:**

To Richie’s great surprise, he wakes up before Eddie on Saturday. Eddie likes to sleep in on weekends—“I work an office job, you learn to be protective of your sleep,” he says, which is true, because he often comes home foul-tempered and takes off his business-casual clothes standing there in the living room and throws them into the corner and then eats dinner with Richie in his boxers, because _I’m fucking starving, Rich, I’m not doing anything until I have some food in my stomach_ despite the striptease—and Richie likes to sleep in every day, because that’s the joy of not filming. They don’t have anything lined up for the year 2017, and Richie’s glad of that now. It means he gets to have Saturday mornings—he glances at the clock—Saturday afternoons sleeping in with Eddie Kaspbrak slumped across him, breathing gentle breaths into Richie’s chest hair.

“Hey, Eds,” Richie says.

Eddie draws in a deep semi-conscious breath and then grunts.

“Can you let me up?” he asks. The cuddling is cute and all, but Richie’s a man of a certain age and he’s just lucky he didn’t have to get up to pee last night. If Eddie happens to roll onto his bladder or anything, disaster is imminent.

“No,” Eddie says.

“That’s a shame,” Richie says. “If I’d known you wanted a waterbed, I would’ve bought one.”

“Water— _ugh_ ,” Eddie groans as he realizes what Richie means, and rolls off him and onto the mattress. He doesn’t even try for the pillow, which is only Eddie’s nominally since he never fucking uses it.

Richie would very much like to lie there and admire Eddie’s pale shoulder blades up against the white sheets—he never gets tired of that—but he really does have to pee. He gets up, chuckling to himself, and walks past Meg’s hammock at the foot of the bed on his way to the bathroom.

Meg has always preferred to sleep in a hammock over any other fancier dæmon bed. Richie, at last, remembers why.

He uses the bathroom and washes his hands carefully using all of the crazy witchcraft motions. Eddie taped a diagram to the sink. Every time Richie does it he feels like he ought to recite _Something wicked this way comes_. Then he dries his hands, brushes his teeth, and uses his mouthwash. Richie’s ADHD-ridden ass can do those things if he’s in the bathroom already, using the recognized behavioral therapy technique of _eh, might as well_ , but if he walks out of the bathroom before tending to all his ablutions the whole rest of the day is a gamble. And, cute as the faces Eddie pulls when he realizes Richie has morning breath are, Richie likes kissing.

He leans back into the bedroom. “Do you want breakfast?”

Eddie says without moving, “No. I’m sleeping.”

“It’s after noon,” he says. Eddie doesn’t respond. Richie makes his voice condescending and sugary. “Aw, is somebody worn out?”

That gets a response out of him, Eddie going up on one elbow and rolling to look at Richie over his shoulder. “You,” he says, voice sleep-rough, “are the smuggest son of a bitch I have had the misfortune of sharing a bed with.”

“Didn’t sound like a misfortune last night,” Richie says, and gears himself up to mimic the noises Eddie makes in bed, because he loves them and plays them over and over again in his head basically on loop at all times, but Eddie grabs his pillow, throws it at him, and hits him in the face. Richie lets it flop down to the floor. “I get it—beep beep, motherfucker.”

Eddie rolls onto his back, head tilted back and smiling. He might be annoyed, but he’s playing at being annoyed, and he looks plenty smug too. For a moment Richie considers throwing the whole concept of breakfast aside and crawling back in with him. Then Eddie gets the faintly hopeful, uncertain look he always gets before he asks Richie for something. “Can you make eggs?”

“Best eggs you’ve ever had the misfortune of eating,” Richie promises him, and goes back to the kitchen.

Despite the sofa being available, Ishernai sleeps on a large dæmon bed on the floor. It is so squishy that Richie can’t walk across it steadily, so it’s tucked into the corner; Ishernai, back up to his healthy weight of about five hundred pounds, give or take a few stone, has worn a dent in it the way a butt wears a divot into a couch cushion. He looks up when Richie passes by, one ear flicking confusedly. It’s really cute.

“Do you want eggs?” Richie offers. Dæmons don’t need to eat but sometimes they like to, for the same reason that people enjoy eating. And Richie makes some damn good eggs. He’s not a culinary master or anything, but he has the staples down pretty well.

Ishernai’s ear flicks back and forth again, considering. “Scrambled?” he asks.

“However you want ’em,” Richie promises.

The boar’s ear turns to point towards Richie, certain now. “With pepper,” he requests.

That’s how Eddie likes them. He still gets nervous over sunny-side-up eggs—doesn’t like them runny—but he puts so much pepper on scrambled eggs that Richie’s surprised he doesn’t sneeze himself through the wall and into the next room.

“You got it,” Richie says, and goes about the business of making three and a half plates of scrambled eggs. Meg can be prissy about whether or not she actually wants to eat, but she sulks if Richie at least doesn’t make the option available to her, and if it turns out she doesn’t want them either he’ll eat them or he’ll give them to Ishernai.

“Why am I so tired?” Ishernai complains when Richie comes back out with a plate for him. “What did you do? It can’t have been that athletic, you’re not in good enough shape.”

Richie snorts and lays the plate down next to the big cushion. “Big talk considering you’re the reason we couldn’t get a house with _stairs_.”

“I have short little legs,” the boar points out, grouchy.

Richie sits down on the floor next to him. “Eds, your eggs are getting cold,” he calls into the bedroom, but there’s no response. Out here, Ishernai gives a snuffling sniff to the plate of food. “Cute, cute, cute,” he singsongs.

“I’m not cute,” Ishernai says, sounding put-out. “I’m a possible carrier of bovine tuberculosis, hemorrhagic sepsis, and anthrax.”

It is too goddamn early to be talking about anthrax, and also where the fuck did that come from.

“You are too cute,” Richie insists. “Look at your short little legs. Look at your big ears. The only way you could be cuter is if you had baby pig stripes.” Sometimes he thinks about that, if he’s honest with himself. He’s nowhere near mentally well-adjusted enough to have kids, and the luxury of having sex with someone you can’t impregnate is that he can’t do it accidentally. But sometimes he thinks about how kids mimic their parents’ dæmons, and how fucking cute a stripey little piglet would be.

God, what is happening to him in his middle age?

Ishernai has one long stripe down his back, almost in line with his mane but not quite. It’s a scar on the skin and not a pattern of fur, but it means that his bristles don’t grow back along it in exactly the same way. Eddie’s self-conscious about it—he was pacing back and forth before his first day at his new office job, saying, _I don’t know what they’re going to think about me_ , to which Richie responded: _Tragic accident while searching for truffles_.

“They’re called squeakers,” Ishernai says. “Not baby pigs.”

“I know a squeaker.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Eddie says from behind Richie. He looks up and over to see him coming out of the hallway into the living room, wrapped up in his bathrobe. His hair is _wild_.

“Good morning, love of my life,” Richie singsongs. “Are you cold?”

“No,” Eddie says, creeping over to them. He’s wearing slippers—walking on the carpet is fine, but he can’t stand touching tile with his bare feet. He says it makes him aware of dirt and grit on the floor and that sends him into a cleaning frenzy; Richie, having seen it happen, believes him. “I missed you.”

He keeps getting Richie with that one-two punch.

Richie gets up, his knees creaking in protest. “I’m right here,” he says.

Eddie wanders over to him and fits up against him, arms pinned between the two of them like he’s cold and trying to warm his hands. “You can touch,” he says, looking down at Ishernai. “We talked about it.”

“I know,” Richie says. “I’m gonna wait until you’re drinking something and then see if you do a spit-take.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Eddie says. Richie just laughs and folds him up.

They eat breakfast at the table and when Richie looks over he sees that Meg has come out of the bedroom too and is lounging on the bed with Ishernai, tucked in the space under his impressive belly. When he looks back at Eddie, Eddie’s attention is on Richie’s hands, on the healed scars of puncture wounds between the webs of his fingers.

“I’m okay,” Richie says. Eddie has two little dots in his cheek, easily mistaken for some kind of pigmentation thing if you don’t know that they’re from a snakebite. “Why’re you talking about anthrax?”

“Oh.” Eddie shrugs and pushes his eggs around. “Do you remember when we settled?”

Richie’s first response is _No_ , but then he does. Back up in front of that big reflective glass window, looking over at Eddie—still coated in dried vomit on top of all the sewage—and realizing that Meg was still sitting on top of the big wild boar that charged It down in Its lair, right after Eddie screamed _I’m gonna kill you!_

“Better go back to being something cutesy,” Richie said. “Your mom’ll have a heart attack.”

“Her problem,” Eddie said, which was how he announced to the rest of the group that this felt right and he wasn’t changing.

Richie says, “God, I would have loved to see you at your old job.” Eddie has already admitted to having had his own office, with its glass walls. Richie sometimes fantasizes about that—the ratings vary between the obvious and sometimes just watching interns and middle-management and bureaucrats go scuttling by, wondering why risk analyst Eddie Kaspbrak has a big fuck-off wild boar dæmon. _Don’t mess with that guy._

“You would not,” Eddie says with great certainty, and Richie decides to contradict him on that later, when the fantasies seem more relevant and the topic of _anthrax_ isn’t there to kill the mood. “Anyway, Mom looked up all this shit about diseases and parasites.”

Richie stares at him. “He’s a dæmon.” Dæmons can’t get diseases or parasites. They don’t have independent immune systems or real organ systems or gut bacteria or anything.

“I’ve noticed,” Eddie says drily. “She just would have rathered we settled as something small and neat and clean—”

“And easy to trap in the house?” Richie suggests, feeling one of his eyebrows slide up.

“Ding ding ding,” Eddie says, waving his index finger in a small circle.

Richie leans back and puts his feet up on Eddie’s thighs across the table, folding his arms. “Meg’s an organ grinder monkey.”

“I know that,” Eddie says.

“No,” Richie says. “That’s _why_ she’s a capuchin. _Because_ they’re the organ grinder monkey.”

Eddie’s brow furrows. “I don’t think that’s how it works,” he says. “I don’t think that’s how—people are a certain way, you don’t just pick a certain metaphor and run with it.”

“We didn’t choose it,” Richie says. “But It knew.” He still can’t listen to Springsteen without getting nauseous, and that feels like almost more of an insult than any of the homophobic bullshit It spewed at him. Almost. He changes the subject. “What’s a crossguard?”

“What?”

“A crossguard,” Richie says. “At least, I think that’s what you said. You said, _No crossguard. Mistake._ ”

Eddie blushes suddenly. “Oh,” he says. “Uh—when you go boar hunting.”

“Yeah, when I go boar hunting,” Richie says incredulously.

Eddie waves a hand. “You know what I mean. You use a special spear with a crossguard. It keeps a boar from charging you after you’ve already, uh, stabbed it.”

“I’m right here,” Ishernai says, indignant.

Richie stares at him, feeling his mouth open. “Oh my god.”

“It’s, uh. There was a lot of morbid shit like that that I looked up, when Ma was, uh.” Eddie shrugs.

“That’s… that’s not just morbid shit, that’s fucking _baller_ ,” Richie says, which is right up there with _sloppy bitch_ on the list of words he really doesn’t use so he doesn’t know why he ends up saying them. “Holy _shit_ , Eds.”

Eddie does what he seems to have become accustomed to doing, which is, instead of telling Richie not to call him Eds, blushing ferociously and gorgeously instead. He shrugs.

“You tell me you read that shit in a book once in 1989 and you were like, _Oh yeah, time to drive a spear through my own body, because I will not be stopped by god or man._ ”

“The thought process wasn’t that deep,” Ishernai offers.

“It never is,” Meg chips in.

“Richie,” Eddie says, embarrassed.

“Did you tell him about the back fat?” Meg asks, her voice pointed. Ishernai starts laughing and Eddie’s blush deepens and he hides his head on the table, the remainder of his eggs going cold and rubbery.

Richie’s confused, because he looks at Eddie’s back every day and there’s hardly any fat on his whole tight little body. “The what?”

“Boars only develop subcutaneous tissue like that in preparation for mating season, I _can’t_ believe you told her that,” Eddie says, sounding deeply betrayed.

Richie is astonished and delighted. Dæmons aren’t subject to the same circadian rhythms and bodily systems that real animals are, but they change depending on certain stimuli—they scar when trauma happens, and sometimes dæmons in colder climates will develop or shed winter coats.

“Are you telling me,” Richie says slowly, “that you were so hot for me that it saved all our lives?”

“That is not what happened,” Eddie snaps, pitching Richie’s feet off his lap.

“That’s what I’m hearing,” he says. He can’t believe Meg would keep a secret that good from him, but considering how it’s making Eddie squirm, he kind of can. “Are you done with your eggs?”

Eddie looks up, apparently startled by how fast he’s dropped such a juicy topic. “I—yeah, I’ll do the dishes, it’s fine—”

“No, you won’t,” Richie says, and gets up and comes around the table with every intention of dragging Eddie back to bed.

He does look good in diamonds. He looks better out of them.

**Author's Note:**

> Dæmons:  
> Richie & Meginhard "Meg," stage name "Nanna," capuchin monkey  
> Eddie & Ishernai, central European wild boar  
> Bev, green anaconda  
> Ben, little spiderhunter  
> Mike & Chippenham "Mr. Chips," Belgian Malinois  
> Bill, carrion crow  
> Stan, golden-orb weaver spider  
> Henry Bowers, blunt-nosed viper
> 
> The Ritual of Chüd is very much based on the book portrayal, which involved Bill and Richie fighting it in a psychic mindspace and the rest of the Losers by and large kind of standing around waiting for something to happen, until It got smart and tried to kill Bill while he was in the deadlights.
> 
> I doubt most characters in the dæmon-verse are as self-aware as Richie and Eddie are at the end there, but I couldn't help myself. Thanks to @znating on Twitter for asking me the question "What would the Losers' dæmons be?"


End file.
